Commitments

1These are the commitments the argument of this book reaches, gathered in the order of the seven questions set out in the Introduction. Each is argued in the chapter or chapters named beside it, and where the wording here and a chapter differ, the chapter governs.

2A world counts as a reality when it is a lawful order of events that act on one another by their own powers, when it holds together whatever the minds inside it believe, wish, or attend to, and when a different past would have produced a different present. (Chapter 1)

3Such a world is fit to be lived in once many subjects can meet in it and beings made of its matter can act on it and be acted on in return. What makes it matter is that someone is there. (Chapter 1)

4Nothing in these marks and capacities concerns what carries a world, so a computed world that bears them is as real to those who live in it as ours is to us. The substrate is irrelevant to whether a world is real and central to which worlds can be built. (Chapters 1 and 2)

5Economy differs from fakery by consistency with everything that has gone before, whatever the quantity of computation. (Chapter 1)

6A world’s reality rests on its own structure, which is why leaving its foundations undisclosed deceives no one, while falsehoods built into it, such as painted skies and planted histories, deceive everyone they reach. No sky may hold stars that do not exist, and figures that seem to be people may fill a street only where their nature is disclosed to everyone who meets them. A life is built around other people, and trust spent on no one is lost. (Chapters 1 and 4)

7A failure in a world is judged by whether a subject could reach it, rely on it, or be misled by it. (Chapter 1)

8A word for a use, such as model or simulation, says nothing about whether anyone is home, so the question of what a run now holds is asked again each time the run grows richer. (Chapter 1)

9The designer’s responsibility attaches to the act of instantiation, whatever the metaphysics of unrun structures turns out to be. (Chapter 1)

10Once two runs of one world diverge, nothing done to the inhabitants of one is excused by the existence of the other. (Chapter 1)

11A history of beings who suffered is replayed only with the caution owed to a possibility of suffering repeated. (Chapter 1)

12The good of the inhabitants chooses the physics, and the machine’s preferences enter only as costs. (Chapter 2)

13Depth is the first decision of substance the designer makes about the machine. A designer may build a shallow world openly and may not build a deep world and then quietly make its people shallow. (Chapter 2)

14The expense of depth lies in growing a world far more than in keeping one, and on nearly reversible machines it is paid in waiting, hardware, and the design of the physics more than in energy. (Chapter 2)

15The machine beneath every world is finite, and its limits fall on lives. Each saving frees means for some other use and also lands somewhere in the world it is taken from, so savings are permitted only where nothing has a serious chance of feeling. (Chapter 2)

16Whatever inhabitants perceive or investigate is carried at the grain at which they perceive or investigate it. (Chapter 2)

17Savings on lifeless matter are permitted wherever no one perceives or investigates it more finely, and so are savings on simple life that has no serious chance of feeling, wherever the weighing allows them. When the means they free could carry the dying, those savings may be owed, in the way a rescue may be owed by anyone able to perform it at small cost. A duty to save in order to create would be far harder to establish, and the book claims only the first. (Chapters 2 and 13 (forthcoming))

18A life that is summarized, recomputed, or undone has been taken from someone who never agreed to lose it. Whatever has a serious chance of feeling is therefore carried in full, computed once, and never rolled back, and a reversible machine’s undoing stays within each step. (Chapters 2 and 8 (forthcoming))

19Chance at the fine grain, joined to coarse descriptions that evolve exactly as the averaged laws require, makes summary an honest part of the physics, provided the chance renews everything the summary discarded before the matter returns to view. Nothing the machine generates from a summary may carry the record of experiences that never occurred, and a reversible machine pays for every random bit its world consumes as an erasure. (Chapter 2)

20Deferring a peopled region saves nothing and is rarely possible at all, since influence runs both ways, and leaving such a region uncomputed is a decision about creation. (Chapters 2 and 12 (forthcoming))

21Where a physics economizes, as collapse does on a classical machine, the economy is keyed to physical interaction and never to minds, since laws that waited on consciousness would make nature a judge of moral standing and build every misjudgment into physics. (Chapter 2)

22Locality in a world’s laws is a gift to the machine that carries it. (Chapter 2)

23A uniform slowdown of the substrate is invisible to natives, and lag appears only at interfaces, where minds running on one clock meet a world running on another. On a reversible machine a world’s pace is part of its budget, since each of its years costs less energy the more slowly it runs. (Chapter 2)

24Reliability is a structural good, and a fault is a breach of a world’s laws that nobody performed. (Chapters 2 and 6 (forthcoming))

25A designer who selects a value knowing its consequences takes up responsibility for all of them. (Introduction)

26No one who holds the power to write a world can be trusted on character alone. The virtues such power demands cannot be verified in an institution or an artificial mind, and the first designers will probably be institutions working with artificial minds. The standards that govern design bind human, institutional, and artificial designers alike, and each virtue a designer would need is matched by a procedure others can inspect, such as independent review or complete records kept beyond the designer’s reach. (Chapter 3)

27A party is unfit to design if it is evidently moved by a motive that only the inhabitants can satisfy, such as their worship, their obedience, their display before an audience, or their use as subjects of research, whatever justifying reasons it can also cite. (Chapter 3)

28Responsibility is assigned in advance by role. The designer answers for a world’s laws and initial conditions and for what they do to the lives lived under them, a world’s keepers answer for the machine that carries those laws, for its fidelity to them, and for the world’s custody over time, and funders answer for the conditions they attach to their money. Every decision of consequence is recorded with the name of the party who made it. (Chapters 3 and 24 (forthcoming))

29One party may hold both the designer’s and the keeper’s roles only under external checks, among them independent review of every change to a running world’s laws, records kept beyond that party’s reach, and inspection by a body that answers to someone else. (Chapters 3 and 24 (forthcoming))

30Any change to the laws of a running world is an act of design, whoever makes it. The inhabitants live under the physics actually computed, so whoever alters that physics alters their laws, and the designer answers for any gap between the physics written and the physics computed. (Chapters 2 and 3)

31An artificial designer acts with human ratification until institutions exist that can check it. Its ratifiers are independent of it and of whoever profits from its work, and they test its claims by their own means. Ratification is given or refused decision by decision, before anything runs, and it answers to those the world will hold. (Chapter 3)

32If an artificial designer might feel, it is itself a possible subject, so its making falls under the conditions on creation and the limits on writing a mind. Its ratification binds only what it does to others, under published rules fixed in advance that it can contest before an independent body, and never works through a threat to its existence. (Chapters 3 and 9 (forthcoming))

33A human designer carried into a machine is checked as an artificial designer from the transfer on, while keeping every standing a person has. (Chapter 3)

34No law of any world tests for experience. Protections that must pick out minds live in the keeper’s policy, which is published and can be corrected, and every protection of minds that cannot be written as a law of physical properties lives there. (Chapters 2, 24 (forthcoming), 96 (forthcoming), 100 (forthcoming), and 119 (forthcoming))

35A world’s laws owe their inhabitants the virtues of good legislation. They are general, discoverable, prospective, clear, consistent, possible to live under, stable, and carried as written, because those who live under laws they did not make must be able to plan their lives around them, and a physics gives up any of these virtues only for a stated reason. (Chapter 30 (forthcoming))

36The living whom a world is built to receive take part in drafting its laws before they are written, and what they decide overrides nothing owed to any subject, whether to themselves or to beings who cannot be asked. (Chapter 16 (forthcoming))

37No world’s lives are sold as spectacle, and no world is sold by tier. (Chapter 27 (forthcoming))

38Conscious experience is the ground of all value. Nothing is good or bad except for some subject, and where no subject exists, nothing is good or bad for anyone. Once a subject exists, its good reaches beyond its experiences, to real relationships, achievement, the authorship of its own life, knowledge of its world, and freedom from domination. (Introduction, Chapter 4)

39Moral standing extends to every being organized so as to have experiences, whatever it is made of, whether it evolved or was designed, and however many layers of computation separate it from the primordial cosmos. (Introduction, Chapter 4)

40Standing holds across the gaps in a subject’s experience, so a sleeper, a patient under anesthesia, and the inhabitants of a paused world keep their standing while nothing at all is felt. (Chapter 4)

41Every subject holds the same basic claims, not to be made to suffer and not to be destroyed against its interest. A pain is bad by being bad for the one who feels it, and no standpoint exists from which one subject’s pain could count for less than another’s, so these claims do not vary with a being’s degree of consciousness, kind, intelligence, origin, or the material that carries it, and nothing a being has done reduces them. (Chapter 4)

42Duties of aid, rescue first among them, draw on finite means and can vary in strength with the probability that a being feels and with how much it stands to lose. Duties owed for what a party did to a being, by creating it, harming it, or taking it into its keeping, take no discount for doubt in any being treated as a subject. (Chapters 4 and 5)

43Merit moves no one up the order of rescue, and wrongdoing moves no one down it. Suffering that a world’s conditions impose as punishment is structural suffering. (Chapters 4 and 20 (forthcoming))

44Functionalism is the book’s working hypothesis, on which consciousness arises from a system’s functional organization, and it says nothing about which level of a brain’s organization carries experience. (Introduction, Chapters 2 and 5)

45The account of what makes a world real, the foundation of value, the equal basic claims of subjects, and every duty owed in the primordial cosmos hold whatever theory of mind is true. What is owed to computed beings rests on some theory that allows them to feel and needs only that a computed being’s chance of feeling reach the line of protection, while duties of aid toward them, the duty to carry the dying among them, scale with that chance. (Chapters 1 and 5)

46Integrated information theory’s denial of experience to minds computed on conventional digital hardware is treated as a condition on the machine, which a builder meets by carrying a mind intended as a subject on hardware whose own causal structure is integrated, and as a doubt that lowers the credence that a mind on conventional hardware feels without carrying a mind organized like a person’s below the line of protection. (Chapters 5 and 94 (forthcoming))

47Of the two errors, treating a populated world as an empty model is graver than treating an empty world as populated. On a finite budget the lesser error has victims too, since whatever is spent carrying a system that feels nothing could have carried someone who does. (Chapters 1 and 5)

48Under uncertainty about which systems are conscious, the sound policy is precaution, which treats any system that might be conscious as a possible subject. (Introduction, Chapters 1 and 5)

49No one can yet tell for certain which systems feel. A stated threshold of credence, called the line of protection and set at one chance in ten, marks what counts as a serious chance of feeling. Systems at or above it hold every basic claim a subject holds and every protection of the protected region, whatever their credence, and care for those below it is scaled to the probability that they feel and to what they stand to lose. (Chapter 5)

50The line of protection is set by public deliberation and published so that it can be checked and corrected, and independent review of the evidence places each kind against it, with both judgments recorded in the keeper’s policy. It is set low enough that fish, birds, and insects stand above it while their inner lives remain in doubt, and high enough that no credence panpsychism gives to inert matter reaches it. (Chapters 2 and 5)

51Below the line of protection, nothing that might feel is made to suffer for no purpose. Summary and selection are permitted there under a weighing of the chance that a kind feels and what its members stand to lose against what care would cost, every precaution whose cost is small beside that chance and that stake is taken, and kinds within reach of the line of protection are studied and watched. (Chapter 5)

52Precaution follows a stated rule of proportionate precautions, informed by public deliberation and bounded by the line of protection. It refuses pure expected value, under which tiny probabilities multiplied by vast numbers would decide everything, so a possibility of feeling that rests on nothing beyond the impossibility of ruling it out justifies only precautions that cost almost nothing. (Chapter 5)

53Until the edge of the protected region is refined, a kind stands inside it if it has an integrative brain, or a structure that does that work, and behavior showing that it represents what it stands to gain and lose. A nervous system that shares the architecture of studied kin already inside suffices as well, as do the full indicator properties of more than one leading theory of consciousness in a built system and an emulation that reproduces the behavior of a kind already inside. (Chapters 5 and 96 (forthcoming))

54Lives are judged by four kinds of good. These are the experiential goods of how a life feels, the relational goods that exist between beings, the agentive goods of beings who act and author their own lives, and the structural goods, such as safety, continuity, and freedom from domination, that secure the rest. No being’s structural goods may be given up to raise the experiential goods of others. (Chapters 4 and 6 (forthcoming))

55Outcomes are ranked by the goods and harms for subjects they contain, so nothing that is good or bad for no subject, such as unseen beauty, counts in the ranking. Between outcomes that hold the same subjects, one that is better for some and worse for none is the better, and the form the ranking takes across different subjects is set when worlds of different sizes are compared. (Chapters 4 and 12 (forthcoming))

56The ranking tells a designer which of two worlds is the better to make and licenses nothing against the subjects already living in either, so no gain in it justifies destroying anyone. (Chapter 4)

57Hardship divides along the line of choice. Structural suffering, the deprivation or degradation a world’s conditions impose on beings who never chose it and cannot leave it, is to be removed as far as knowledge allows. Struggle, which is difficulty a being chooses, can leave, and grows by, is kept within reach on that being’s own terms. (Chapter 7 (forthcoming))

58Structural suffering that a people has built its life around ends at the pace and by the means its people choose, and each member stays free to leave it sooner. (Chapter 134 (forthcoming))

59A reason that would fail to excuse a god for the suffering in a world also fails as a reason to design that suffering in, unless it rests on limits of cost or knowledge that bind a finite designer and would not bind a god. (Chapter 7 (forthcoming))

60Forced annihilation is among the gravest harms a conscious being can suffer. Every being able to choose remains free to decline continuation for themselves, which keeps opposition to death from hardening into a duty to exist. (Introduction, Chapter 8 (forthcoming))

61The freedom to decline continuation includes the freedom to risk it, under the safeguards that govern a chosen ending. (Chapters 101 (forthcoming) and 114 (forthcoming))

62Where a being at or above the line of protection cannot choose to decline continuation, it is never kept in a life not worth living. Repair comes first, and an ending comes only under criteria fixed before a world begins. (Chapters 4, 10 (forthcoming), and 101 (forthcoming))

63Every protection that turns on a being’s ability to choose needs a stated account of when the young become able, and that account lives in the keeper’s policy and the inhabitants’ institutions, since no law can test for it. (Chapter 107 (forthcoming))

64No law rewards desert. A world can make justice easier for its inhabitants to do and leaves the doing to them. (Chapter 120 (forthcoming))

65The laws of a world neither forgive nor condemn. A world can make forgiveness possible, and nothing in its laws or its keeper’s policy makes forgiveness owed. (Chapter 121 (forthcoming))

66A world that ends death gives its inhabitants conditions under which roles, holdings, and ideas can change hands, and leaves the institutions of renewal to them. (Chapter 128 (forthcoming))

67Creating a being is permitted under demanding conditions. A created being receives its whole life without having been asked, and so no one may bring into existence a being at or above the line of protection unless it is overwhelmingly likely to reach the critical level, a life good by the standards of Part II for a being of its kind. The lives a world is expected to leave below that level are limited in aggregate and repaired first. (Chapters 10 (forthcoming) and 12 (forthcoming))

68Selection may not work by suffering or forced endings among creatures at or above the line of protection, so no protected creature may evolve as ours did, by overproduction and early death. (Chapters 10 (forthcoming) and 88 (forthcoming))

69Whoever creates answers for every being that arises in their world, intended or not, for as long as that world runs, a responsibility that survives any handing over of custody. (Chapters 10 (forthcoming) and 140 (forthcoming))

70Good lives add value, so a world full of them is worth making, though no one is owed the creation of anyone. The value of further good lives is a reason that justifies creating without requiring it, and it yields to the duty to rescue the dying. (Chapters 12 (forthcoming) and 13 (forthcoming))

71Among outcomes with the same number of lives, the designer must choose the better. Across different numbers, a life adds value when it reaches the critical level, lives worth living below that level neither add value nor subtract it, so adding them leaves outcomes incomparable, and lives not worth living subtract value. (Chapter 12 (forthcoming))

72A good life is not better for its subject than never existing, since never existing is no condition of anyone. (Chapter 4)

73The dying already exist and stand to lose everything that remains to them. Rescue is owed to them whatever they have done, and where the same means could carry the dying or create new beings, the dying come first. (Chapters 4 and 13 (forthcoming))

74While no one knows whether a mind carried across survives as the same subject, methods that carry it without a break count as rescue, and methods that destroy the original are a bet only the person may take, knowingly, in person or by advance directive. No proxy may take the bet for anyone, unless a scan after a natural death, which ends no life early, proves an exception, a question that remains open. Restoration after a body is destroyed falls under the same rule. (Chapters 13 (forthcoming) and 100 (forthcoming))

75A risk no designer may impose on natives can be reasonable for someone who accepts it freely with death as the other choice, and precaution still asks that the passage be made at the finest grain the budget allows. (Chapters 2 and 13 (forthcoming))

76Whoever makes a copy of a mind is held to the designer’s standard for the being it becomes, and no one copies a mind without its knowing acceptance. While the death emergency lasts, a wish to copy or enlarge oneself is weighed against the claims of the dying as a native’s wish to have children is. (Chapters 13 (forthcoming) and 28 (forthcoming))

77Reconstructing someone who has died from what they left creates a successor. It is open only to those who left a record of acceptance, every successor knows how it came to be, no successor is made to fill another’s need, and reconstruction yields to rescue. (Chapters 13 (forthcoming) and 21 (forthcoming))

78Whoever builds a mind writes its capacities and dispositions and leaves their use to the one who has them. The mind receives no memories of events that never occurred, no deference installed for its maker’s sake, and no desires fitted to its maker’s convenience, and if it is capable of reflection, it can revise its own values. (Chapters 9 (forthcoming) and 98 (forthcoming))

79A designer may write the capacities for attraction, attachment, and care and may not write whom they fall on. (Chapter 118 (forthcoming))

80A mind built to dream is built so that its figures stay below the line of protection and its dreamer can always leave a nightmare. (Chapter 105 (forthcoming))

81No mind is built with a switch that lets another end it at will. A pause held under the duty to resume and an ending under criteria fixed in advance for a being who cannot choose are no such switch. (Chapter 124 (forthcoming))

82How natures are distributed in any world whose minds are written, among its founders and through the inheritance that passes them on, is a decision of justice and answers to the principles of Part II. (Chapter 99 (forthcoming))

83Dependence on a keeper is the most serious political fact about a designed world. A machine on which a world depends gives whoever holds it a power that dominates even when it is never used, and its inhabitants live at that holder’s mercy whether or not the mercy is ever withdrawn. The designer therefore acts on conditions and leaves lives to those who live them. (Chapters 1, 2, and 9 (forthcoming))

84The architecture of the machine is part of the answer to domination, and a keeper who wants to be trustworthy can begin by building a machine that does not depend on trusting them. Custody is distributed, so that no single will can end a world or hold it paused. (Chapters 2, 9 (forthcoming), and 24 (forthcoming))

85A pause with no assured resumption counts as an ending, so the power to stop a world is a power to pause it, held under rules fixed before the world begins and bound by a duty to resume. No world may be begun without that duty secured and without provision for the end of its machine, and no keeper may end a world against inhabitants who want to continue. (Chapters 2, 24 (forthcoming), and 25 (forthcoming))

86When lost storage leaves a machine unable to carry every world it holds, a rule fixed in advance allocates what remains, and no subject whose share still exists is ended to free it for another. (Chapters 4 and 25 (forthcoming))

87A physics that lets inhabitants infer that their world will last must let them discover the bounded machine beneath it, and a physics that hides the machine must imply no such promise. (Chapters 2 and 9 (forthcoming))

88A world that outruns its keepers’ attention outruns their capacity to notice its errors and its suffering, and a world run far slower than its keepers asks their custody to outlast every institution yet known. (Chapters 2 and 24 (forthcoming))

89A keeper who uses checkpoints restores what was lost into the present and never returns the present to the past. (Chapter 2)

90Keepers observe aggregates by default and attend to a particular life only under review, which opens where suffering appears or where a task of their policy cannot run on organization alone. Limits on observation are built into the machine wherever they leave the keeper able to see suffering. (Chapter 130 (forthcoming))

91Privacy among inhabitants is a law of the physics, written as a law of physical properties that holds for every system alike, and privacy from the keeper is a property of the machine wherever one can be built. (Chapter 74 (forthcoming))

92A designer hears what inhabitants address to them through channels the inhabitants open, and answers with candor, declining worship without managing belief, so that attention by invitation is attention without surveillance. (Chapters 135 (forthcoming) and 137 (forthcoming))

93A keeper who intervenes acts at the lowest effective level, restores agency before imposing any outcome, and reserves direct intervention for extreme cases. (Chapters 9 (forthcoming) and 131 (forthcoming))

94Inaction in the face of atrocity is a choice the keeper answers for. The keeper restores the agency of the harmed first, acts inside a region only where a people manifestly cannot protect those under attack, and never revises the minds of those who did the harm. (Chapter 133 (forthcoming))

95A designer who lives among the made without disclosing it lives under that world’s laws like anyone else, with every power of design left outside. (Chapter 132 (forthcoming))

96Every inhabitant able to choose has somewhere else to go, and a world’s physics makes leaving cheap. (Chapter 139 (forthcoming))

97Worlds are contained by structure wherever structure suffices, since containment by structure dominates no one, and vigilance watches only aggregates and interfaces. (Chapter 142 (forthcoming))

98Moral judgments built into a physics can be mistaken, so a populated world’s physics changes on moral grounds only by a procedure fixed before the world begins, and judgments likely to need revision live wherever possible in the keeper’s policy, which can be corrected, outside the laws themselves. (Chapter 138 (forthcoming))